Oura is updating its smart rings with two new features this week, both of which are focused on improving cardiovascular health. Cardio Effort, which tracks how hard you pushed in your workouts throughout the week, and automatic VO2 Max, a measurement of your aerobic capacity, are now available on Oura Ring Gen 3 models and later. They also match similar features offered on Apple’s and Garmin’s smartwatches.

Keeping parity with other wearables is increasingly important for Oura. While the company has become synonymous with the concept of smart rings through a combination of timing, savvy marketing, and good product design, competitors like Ultrahuman and RingConn remain and are only growing in number when you consider the wider category of screenless wearables.

If you’ve experimented with Apple’s Training Load, Oura’s Cardio Effort will feel similar, if perhaps a bit more technical and detailed. It also complements Oura’s existing Readiness Score. If your Readiness score gives you a sense of whether you should tackle a big workout or rest, then Cardio Effort is a measurement of “how hard your cardiovascular system was working and how long that demand was sustained.”

Oura looks at things like the intensity and duration of a workout, like Apple, but rather than asking for effort ratings like Training Load does, it measures your heart rate response against your resting heart rate. Each workout adds to your weekly total, which Oura then sorts into one of five categories: Light, Fair, Maintaining, Building, and Reaching. A Light rating means you experienced substantially lower cardiovascular strain than normal, while Reaching means you’ve experienced meaningfully higher strain than normal.

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